This past week was the Prophet’s birthday so we had a five day weekend. We took this chance to head north to the Rif mountains and to the city of Fes. We visited a town called Chefchaouen (described as the most beautiful small town in Morocco) in the mountains known for its blueness (many walls and walkways and doors are blue-washed.) The whole area was beautiful and green, a drastic difference to the south of Morocco. We stayed in a small pension called Hotel Mauritania, which was small and cozy and with good character. We spent our time there wandering the streets and taking lots of blue photos and hiking in the mountains nearby. The area is also known for it’s marijuana which is why no peace corps volunteers are in the Rif. There are quite a few farmers offering agro-tourism of their marijuana farms. There is also a very heavy Spanish influence there (makes sense, very close to Spain.) The textiles and even the music had a definite Spanish twist and Spanish is spoken before French which is used in most of Morocco. After exploring Chefchaouen for two nights we headed by bus to Fes, described as the most complete medieval city in the Arab world. It’s a big modern city with many ancient monuments hidden in its windy streets. Fes is known for its leather tanneries which we were able to visit and its old medersas or Islamic colleges. We spent our time there wandering the streets. We’ve been watching quite a bit of bizarre foods with Andy Zimmern, so we decided to try lots of street food. We had a chance to taste makootas (fried mashed potato cakes), pastilla (fried meat pie filled with chicken or beef or rice or noodles), camel burger, spleen sandwich, variety of fried fish and a variety of fresh baked breads. We didn’t try everything though, there were lots of unidentifiable organs and fish in lard that we chose to pass up.